After only three days of interviews, a Playboy photographer has immortalized on Polaroid "hundreds and hundreds" of University women vying to represent Penn State in one of the magazine's fall pictorials.

Yesterday marked Playboy photographer David Chan's last day of interviewing for the October 1991 "Girls of the Big Ten Conference" issue. Chan said he had not yet counted the number of applicants who crowded into the seventh floor suite in the Atherton Hilton, 125 S. Atherton St., where he and an assistant interviewed.

The turnout was surprising, Chan said, since the interviews were not widely advertised and because Penn State is in what he called a conservative area. Chan said he had to get an additional telephone to accommodate the flow of incoming calls.

"I think these young ladies know what Playboy is about," Chan said of the carefully groomed women anxiously completing applications. "Playboy is apple pie of America."

Chan said he and Playboy editor Jeff Cohen will review the applications and photographs and select three or four women who represent a "good cross section" of Penn State women. Penn State was the first stop on Chan's list of Big Ten schools. Chan will now travel to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., to photograph more students.

The pictorial models can make up to $500, Chan added, depending on whether they pose nude, semi-nude or clothed.

Playboy will then notify and again photograph the selected women within the next month, said Marda Mills, a Chicago freelance makeup artist working with Chan. But the photography shoots will not be as public as this week's interviews, she added.

"No one will know (when or where)," Mills said. "We don't want anyone harassing the girls."

Mills and Chan said they have not encountered any protesters, but have heard about the Undergraduate Student Government Department of Women's Concerns' plans to hold a letter-writing campaign tonight. The department will send letters to The Daily Collegian, the Centre Daily Times and Playboy, department co-director Melissa Hardoby said.

But Chan said the department's efforts would be useless.

"(Letter-writing) doesn't help. I think you have to have the whole school do it," Chan said. "I never heard of a write-in before. That's new to me. Sit-in, yes. Write-in, no."

When interviewing for college pictorials, Chan said he always interviews off campus, joking, "Where you gonna photograph nudes (on campus)? On a person's desk?"

Chan said he has photographed for Playboy for 24 years, adding that he's been "doing schools" for the last 15 years. College pictorials are a big seller, he said, because "people love it."

Chan said he loves his work.

"I'm working for a magazine that is one of the most popular magazines on the newsstand. It's a magazine that outsells Newsweek," Chan said. "It's honesty and sincerity that make me want to work there. It all adds up to one person -- Hugh Hefner. He's very honest and sincere in what he does and the way he treats people."